Charlie Toft
Charlie Toft used to win awards for book criticism, but decided that reading was too much work. As a TV writer, his specialty is an encyclopedic and possibly unhealthy knowledge of American Idol.
The Worst TV Ideas Of The Decade
Charlie Toft November 20, 2009
Many television failures fall under the heading of “just one of those things.” After all, most new series don’t make it even one season, and with creative reward comes the risk of looking ridiculous.
But some ideas are so obviously misconceived that they are widely panned even ahead of time, are still remembered years after the fact, and deserve to be held up as examples of What Not To Do. Here, in no particular order, is a list of the worst ideas in television during this past decade.
ABC running Millionaire into the ground: At the start of the decade, ABC was in the position of being a low-rated network with a surprise hit that could be produced cheaply: Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Even though the brass had to know there was the risk of overkill, ABC couldn’t help itself and quickly set out to dilute the show’s “event” quality, first by producing celebrity editions with actual millionaires, and then by running it as many as four nights a week. Within two years, the series was finished in prime time and ABC was left with what it had before: lots of dead spots in its lineup.
Joe Millionaire 2: You can look it up: the first season of this series, in 2003, was one of the biggest hits of the decade. But its premise — women compete for the hand of a millionaire, only to discover in the end that he’s really just an average dude — was obviously one that couldn’t be repeated. Fox gave it a shot anyway with a cast of European women who were presumably not aware of Season One, but America had seen enough.
Elisabeth Rohm on Law & Order: When you make as many cast changes in twenty seasons as Law & Order has, you’re bound to get some clunkers mixed in with the Jerry Orbachs. Hands down the worst addition to the lineup — I’m talking even worse than Fred Thompson — was Rohm as monotoned prosecutor and surprise lesbian Serena Southerlyn. If Rohm were any more wooden, Alex Rodriguez could use her to hit home runs.
Emeril, the sitcom: Emeril Lagasse is a terrific chef, and has been an entertaining presence on The Food Network over the years. Only NBC would look at this resume and think, “Yeah, we should turn this guy into the star of a sitcom.” The series premiered in the fall of 2001, when the country was too preoccupied with other disasters to pay much attention to this one.
The first season of Big Brother: It was this series, and not Survivor, that was supposed to be the big CBS reality breakthrough in the summer of 2000, based on how fascinated other countries seemed to be with this concept. But the production was cable access-cheap, the action was nonexistent, and the cast was too guarded. In short, the network badly underestimated the willingness of the American public to spend its summers watching boring people doing nothing. Subsequent versions of the show have been more crisply edited, and its casts have been getting more exhibitionistic.
Fox cancels Firefly way too soon: Unlike NBC, which for all its weaknesses will usually give a quality quirky show a decent chance to find its audience, Fox has the reputation of quickly abandoning anything that is not an instant hit. The primary example in recent years was Firefly, the Joss Whedon space opera that might have become a Battlestar Galactica had Fox shown any patience at all. But the program was mishandled by the network in any number of ways and was abandoned halfway through the 2002-03 season. The upshot is that now, even when Fox does give a show a fair shot (such as Whedon’s most recent series, the just canceled Dollhouse), the Firefly example still gets cited as evidence of its bad faith.
The 2007-08 writers’ strike: What we know now that we didn’t know then was that the labor stoppage that began in November 2007 coincided with the start of the worst economic downturn most of us have ever seen. But most of the outcomes of the three month long strike by the Writers Guild of America could have been foreseen ahead of time: further losses of audience share for the major networks; an increasing reliance on unscripted shows; new series that lost momentum and never got it back (Dirty Sexy Money, Life), and the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody won.
Two versions of The Apprentice at the same time: The Mark Burnett/Donald Trump series started strongly, but had begun to fade somewhat by the end of its third season. Despite this, NBC decided that for the fall of 2005, two versions of The Apprentice would air: the original Trump version, plus a new edition hosted by recent jailbird Martha Stewart. The bottom line was that Stewart never caught on, and the Apprentice glut sent the Trump show into a tailspin it never pulled out of, even though the title survives in its ridiculous celebrity mode. I still think alternating seasons with Stewart and Trump might have had a chance of working, but The Donald‘s ego never would have permitted this.
David Milch chucks Deadwood for John From Cincinnati: Milch, the eccentric genius best known for his role in fashioning the unique dialogue of NYPD Blue, had the best idea of his life with Deadwood, as rich and brilliantly written a series as American television has ever seen. But Milch has never been the most stable fellow in the world, and decided to abandon his baby with at least a season’s worth of stories left to tell in favor of the incoherent John From Cincinnati. The fiasco epitomized the several years-long slump that HBO only now seems to be emerging from.
Viva Laughlin dies: If you ever wondered why CBS features procedural 60-minute dramas to the exclusion of everything else, look no further than what happened when they decided to branch out a bit in 2007. Viva Laughlin tried to combine a drama about casino intrigue with characters breaking into song, and despite a decent cast (which included producer Hugh Jackman, someone America usually doesn’t mind seeing sing), it was a massive failure, being pulled from the fall schedule after only four days and two episodes, even before the writers’ strike could kill it.
Is it too early to say The Jay Leno Show?: We could be wrong here, but this is sure looking like a miscalculation from the peacock network. While they are definitely saving money in the 10 p.m. hour compared with what the cost of a medium-rated drama would be, the once dominant late night lineup has suffered, and so have the ratings for the late local news shows of network affiliates. Americans have been conditioned for 60 years to think of 10 o’clock as the hour for prestige dramas and 11:30 as the time for frivolous chatter. Leno isn’t going to be the man who changes that, it seems.
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